e for breath. But his
spirits were extraordinarily even, and his days occupied to a point
Flaxman could hardly have believed. He would creep downstairs at eleven,
read his English letters (among them always some from Elgood Street),
write his answers to them--those difficult scrawls are among the
treasured archives of a society which is fast gathering to itself some
of the best life in England--then often fall asleep with fatigue. After
food there would come a short drive, or, if the day was very warm, an
hour or two of sitting outside, generally his best time for talking. He
had a wheeled chair in which Flaxman would take him across to the
convent garden--a dream of beauty. Overhead an orange canopy--leaf and
blossom and golden fruit all in simultaneous perfection; underneath a
revel of every imaginable flower--narcissus and anemones, geraniums and
clematis; and all about, hedges of monthly roses, dark red and pale
alternately, making a roseleaf carpet under their feet. Through the
tree-trunks shone the white sun-warmed convent, and far beyond were
glimpses of downward-trending valleys edged by twinkling sea.

Here, sensitive and receptive to his last hour, Elsmere drank in beauty
and delight; talking, too, whenever it was possible to him, of all
things in heaven and earth. Then, when he came home, he would have out
his books and fall to some old critical problem--his worn and scored
Greek Testament always beside him, the quick eye making its way through
some new monograph or other, the parched lips opening every now and then
to call Flaxman's attention to some fresh light on an obscure
point--only to relinquish the effort again and again with an unfailing
patience.

But though he would begin as ardently as ever, he could not keep his
attention fixed to these things very long. Then it would be the turn of
his favourite poets--Wordsworth, Tennyson, Virgil. Virgil perhaps most
frequently. Flaxman would read the AEneid aloud to him, Robert following
the passages he loved best in a whisper, his hand resting the while in
Catherine's. And then Mary would be brought in, and he would lie
watching her while she played.

'I have had a letter,' he said to Flaxman one afternoon, 'from a Broad
Church clergyman in the Midlands, who imagines me to be still militant
in London, protesting against the "absurd and wasteful isolation" of the
New Brotherhood. He asks me why instead of leaving the Church I did not
join the Church Reform